Check Out a Scene from The Salton Sea

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By Steve Head

It's hard to believe Full Metal Jacket is fifteen years old; seems like yesterday when it was in theaters adjacent to Predator, The Witches of Eastwick and Robocop. Vincent D'Onofrio put in a marvelous performance as the confused private Leonard Lawrence (a.k.a. "Gomer Pyle"). Technically Full Metal Jacket wasn't D'Onofrio's big-screen debut, but it was certainly an unforgettable way to get his career started. Over the past fifteen years D'Onofrio has played his share of unstable characters, some to which the word unstable is an understatement; for example, there's the psychotic Carl Stargher in The Cell and Edgar Bug in Men in Black. "I always try to avoid making typical choices with a character," says D'Onofrio, "and villains are particularly fun and interesting for me because I try to humanize them and give them heart. I have a very short attention span, so I pick the most interesting and complex characters I can find to keep from getting bored."

In The Salon Sea D'Onofrio plays Pooh-Bear, a sadistic crystal-meth kingpin who supplies down-and-out jazz musician Danny Parker (Val Kilmer) and his fellow addict Jimmy "The Fin" (Peter Sarsgaard). "I felt there was a lot I could do with Pooh-Bear when I first read the script," explains D'Onofrio. "He's a foil character who really helps move the story along."

"I think it's you that's not takin' me seriously."

In this scene from The Salton Sea (if you haven't checked out the first one click here, it's a trip), Parker meets Pooh-Bear for the first time and gets a mild warning about producing insufficient funds. "He's a sort of bandit who's out for the money and will screw with people and rob them along the way," adds D'Onofrio. "He also has a strange way of communicating and dealing with situations &#Array; I don't want to give anything away, but it's weird stuff."